


The Strange, Familiar Taste of a Kiss

by cacophonyGilded



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, and au elements centered around the basic idea "what if jim weren't such an asshole at arkham?", but the other two ships are prominent enough that i thought they should be tagged, contains aspects of the plot season 1-season 2, don't be fooled this is first and foremost a gobblepot fic, too unrealistic but there you go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 15:06:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cacophonyGilded/pseuds/cacophonyGilded
Summary: Jim falls in love, and then he falls in love again, and one more time after that.An examination of Jim Gordon's most prominent relationships.





	The Strange, Familiar Taste of a Kiss

Falling in love with Barbara is inevitable. She runs in Jim’s social circle and goes to all his football games; she smells like flowers and tropical fruit, except at home, when she smells like lady’s soap and clean clothes. She’s elegant, and sophisticated, and easy to get along with despite that; she’s fun, and she’s loyal, and she looks at Jim like she really cares what he has to say, even when he’s only talking about city hall’s corrupt legislation, or some volunteer event that he alone participates in, or even just a calculus problem he can’t figure out.

When Jim tastes marriage in his first kiss with her, he decides that he can learn to be okay with it, with her, with them, together, and slips his letterman over her shoulders. She looks more at home in it than he’s ever felt, and he tells her to keep it.

They go steady up until Jim’s first deployment; when he gets back from service, they pick up where they left off.

It’s easy between the two of them, until it isn’t. It’s easy, until he’s a good policeman in a world where good policemen can’t exist, until she wakes up in the night screaming and he’s still on a case, his phone on silent and his mind hundreds of miles away from her comfort. It’s easy until the mob paints a target on his back, until he can’t keep her safe and she can’t stick around. 

He leaves her with shaky hands and an unconquerable insecurity. She leaves him a dear John letter and an empty apartment to deal with, and that’s not easy at all.

The engagement falls apart. When he thinks about it too hard, Jim is pretty sure that was inevitable, too.

 

Falling in love with Leslie is immediate. The world is dark but she is a ray of light, and the second he sees her in Arkham’s infirmary, the entire world (the entire  _ city, _ which is even stranger) seems to finally make sense. If being demoted was all he had to do to meet this woman, then what the hell, Jim thinks, he’d have shot Dick Lovecraft himself.

She’s charming, and curious, and witty, and empathetically  _ not _ Barbara--meaning she’s everything he’s looking for in a relationship right now. Work is more complicated than ever, hard enough to get his old job back, much less win back his colleague’s respect, but with Leslie, they’re simple--he’s out of his depth, hasn’t needed to practice being charming and flirtatious in years, but he wants her, he likes her, he thinks he could even love her, and it’s good, it’s sweet, it’s fun. Jim latches onto the relationship in a desperate pursuit of normalcy, and Leslie doesn’t push him away.

Things go fast between them, maybe too fast. At the precinct, right there in the locker room, she kisses Jim for the first time, and in that kiss, Jim tastes a family, a whole future, 2.5 kids and a dog and a picket fucking fence in the suburbs, the life he could never picture with Barbara but could learn to enjoy if it’s with her, with this woman he’s known for not yet a week.

She’s a part of his work, fully, and even stranger, he stops wanting to shield her from it. It begins to feel natural to trust her, and natural to feel trusted, and if things are moving too fast, well, how long does he have, anyway?

But then she’s pregnant, and things get harder, because she’s begging him to slow down now, to step back from his darkness and his recklessness and to consider a family; their baby and their home and his  _ safety. _ He loves her, he does, but some sacrifices can’t be made, and when she asks him to stay, he still goes, goes, goes.

He’s thrown in Blackgate, and that’s it for them. Picket fences are traded in for barbed wire, and even once he’s out, theirs is a dance he can’t step back into.

 

When he falls in love with Oswald, it’s inadvisable. It’s inescapable, but that doesn’t stop Jim from fighting it, hard, from refusing to acknowledge for months that he recognizes the longing look in Penguin’s eye (it’s nearly the same as the one Barbara wore in the early days, but who’s keeping track?), and for months after that to examine why he’s never quite rebuffed it. Denial is the name of the game, and it is one that Jim  _ excels _ at, but only to a point--a point that’s bound to break, eventually.

Alone at his own apartment for the first time in months, Jim has nothing but time, time to drink, time to reflect. When did this--this  _ thing _ between him and Penguin start, then? When Oswald took the fall for him, went to  _ Arkham _ for him? When the two of them had met as a unit against a common enemy (and what a unit--Barnes’ strike force should be so lucky) for once, and had finally seen each others’ strengths as complements of their own? Or was it before all of that, long before--had something neither of them could fight off (is Oswald trying to fight this off?) grown between them not in light of recent events, but the second they had met in that alley behind Fish Mooney’s, Gordon’s actions on the dock only sealing that  _ something _ and damning them both to each other and to  _ Gotham _ for the rest of their lives?

Every time he looks at Oswald these days, Jim knows it’s the latter, it has to be. Every time he catches a wistful smile or an affectionate lilt in his voice, he’s brought back to the pier and the cold lash of the water and the frightened babbling of a man he could have ended. Could have  _ killed. _ Every time he’s brought back to it, Jim is glad he made his choice.

Maybe he shouldn’t be. That choice, those ties he formed, were what ruined things with Barbara--first, her suspicion that he’d killed the Penguin, then, her unshakable paranoia from her kidnapping--all courtesy of his actions, mingling cancerously with Oswald’s.

And not just Barbara, either! In bed at night, chronically unable to sleep, Jim near weeps for Leslie and what’s become of her, because of him, always because of him, and Oswald. Ed had pulled the trigger, so to speak, but his actions against Galavan had destroyed him first. The second he went out on the manhunt with Cobblepot, Jim ruined his chance for a future with Leslie--they had come to an apex that night, the three of them, standing outside Ed’s apartment and saying goodbye. He can still see Oswald’s face--strangely understanding and regretful, but not asking him to stay. Leslie did, and he had almost gone with her, he  _ had,  _ but Bruce…

Like at the docks, he can’t say that he’d do anything differently if he had to do it again. That’s how it is with Oswald and him, and their twisted history--he thinks it might be wrong, but even if it is, if he had to do everything he’d done since he came to the city all over again, he really can’t say he’d change a thing.

All he’s left with, then, after all these years in Gotham--is this? Feelings for a criminal, a gangster, that fill in through the tiny cracks in his will and force themselves up like a persistent weed? An aversion to doing his job, when that job comes in crosshairs with this particular man? Upholding the law with discretion is just as bad as not upholding it, yet look at Jim--shying away from Penguin-related cases, coming to the club on increasingly tenuous calls, and, perhaps worst of all, all but breaking him out of Arkham with Barnes threatening him all the while.

At the end of the day, all Jim could say was that Hugo Strange was mistreating his patients, and that he had a vested interest in ensuring  _ all _ of Arkham’s inmates--regardless of personal history--were given the help they needed. 

No lingering resentments hung between them on Oswald’s end after that. Any hard feelings--built from Falcone, from uneven deals, from scorned friendship--fell away in a pool of genuine gratitude, and it had hardly been a surprise to him when Oswald showed up at Blackgate with an army at his back, taking him home and hiding him out from the law until his name was cleared. Freedom for freedom. That was when he realized, Jim knows--that was when he made peace with the way he and Penguin twisted together and were  _ good _ for one another, good for Gotham, together. 

After months of fighting it, of reminding himself who he is and who Oswald is and why they can never be those people together, Jim finally snaps, and late at night in the Iceberg Lounge, he kisses the Penguin, the kingpin of Gotham, down into his desk, morals be damned.

There’s no marriage in the kiss, no family; Jim tastes nothing but the blood from his own split lip and the wine Oswald has been drinking. This, in a way, is refreshing, incredibly so, because without a future, he is allowed to live in the present, and in the present, Oswald draws back momentarily to look at him like he hung the moon and the stars to boot, and Jim might not be in love, but he might be in love with that  _ look _ \--that look that makes him feel like a good man, after everything that’s happened and everything that Oswald has seen him do.

Maybe it’s cheap to keep a gangster around to tell him he’s good, and maybe it’s a show of just how low he’s really fallen that he doesn’t care, that he can’t make it feel that way. It’s confusing and it’s complicated and it’s different, but it never feels cheap, not that first night in the club, not when Oswald insists on taking him out to dinner in a part of town where he (probably) won’t be recognized, not even when, after around a month of such dinners in high-class yet somehow seedy-feeling dives, Jim acquieces and brings Oswald home and Harvey seems to know instinctively the next morning that, hey everybody, Jimbo’s finally gotten himself laid! 

It’s nice, and the longer it lasts, the nicer it gets. Jim lets himself ease up around Oswald, and Oswald seems to soften with the promise of companionship. It strikes him, incredulously, that Oswald must really have never had a friend, not a real one, not one who wasn’t threatening to stab him in the back at a moment’s notice, and Jim is struck by the notion that he has to protect this man, has to keep him away from that loneliness, has to make sure that he’s never, ever on his own in that way again.

More than before, their relationship is mutually beneficial. Jim gets information, Oswald gets protection, and this time, neither of them pushes the other too hard. Oswald doesn’t ask Jim to break the law, though he could, and Jim doesn’t ask Oswald not to, though perhaps he should.

Even when they go too far, it’s not fatal; he’s not a poison to him like he was to Barbara or Leslie, because Oswald already lives in this awful world that entangles Jim, thrives in it, can’t be threatened by it. When they find themselves at odds, morally opposed, they may fight and sneer and criticize, but what is there to do at the end of the day but work it out? 

They work much better together.

This is the truth that acts as the glue between them, and has since Jim neglected to put a bullet in Cobblepot’s head at the docks. For the first time, Jim feels he’s improving a life rather than corrupting it. For the first time, Oswald isn’t driven to cruelty through his biting loneliness. They work much, much better together.

As the years pass and they stay together, as Gordon rises the ranks (sometimes, he thinks, simply by the virtue of being the only one who can stand to stick around so long) and Oswald accumulates respect, these two occurrences not strictly independent of one another, Jim reflects that being with Oswald may have been inevitable--they’ve run in the same circles since the second they stepped, newcomers, both, into the underworlds of Gotham--and may have been immediate--for tied formed on those docks never truly broke--but more than anything, it's comfortable. Beneficial. Oswald isn’t Barbara, and he isn’t Leslie, and in a way Jim might always love the two of them. Even so, he won’t--can’t--trade this away to go back, because he and Oswald are right for each other, have always been right, for each other and for Gotham. It’s funny, and it’s strange, but Jim thinks that he can’t be blamed for loving Oswald, inadvisably. 

**Author's Note:**

> y'know, one day I swear I'm going to post an actual story for these two rather than self-indulgent character study. i promise despite all evidence to the contrary i do actually write dialogue


End file.
